This comprehensive guide provides a commonsense approach to keeping a horse healthy, sound, and happy by encouraging horse owners to center horsekeeping practices around the horse's needs.

Heather Smith Thomas grew up on a cattle ranch near Salmon, Idaho, and while still in high school started writing about horses and cattle. She wrote articles to help pay her way through college at the University of Puget Sound. She has raised and trained horses for 60 years and has been writing about them nearly that long, selling more than 14,000 stories and articles to horse and livestock publications. Most of her magazine articles deal with health care, breeding, training, horse behavior/handling, or veterinary topics (horses and cattle).

Thomas writes regularly for more than thirty farm and livestock publications and about twenty-five horse publications, including EQUUS, The Horse, Stable Management, Equine Chronicle, California Thoroughbred, Working Horse, Saddle & Bridle, Eclectic Horseman, Louisiana Horse, Florida Horse, New Mexico Horse Breeder, Polo, Central States Horseman, USDF Connection, and others.

She has published twenty-three books, including Care & Management of Horses: A Practical Guide for the Horse Owner; A Horse in Your Life: A Guide for the New Owner; Your Horse and You; Horses: Their Breeding, Care and Training; The Wild Horse Controversy; Storey's Guide to Raising Horses; Storey's Guide to Training Horses; The Horse Conformation Handbook; Stable Smarts; Understanding Equine Hoof Care; Good Horse, Bad Habits; and Horse Tales: True Stories from an Idaho Ranch.

Thomas also wrote Beyond the Flames: A Family Touched by Fire about her daughter's severe burn injury, sustained fighting a range fire, and valiant fight for life; the long road to recovery; and the effect the experience has had on their family.

Thomas and her husband continue to raise beef cattle and use horses on their Sky Range Ranch in the mountains of eastern Idaho. Their daughter Andrea Daine lives nearby on the ranch and helps with the cattle care, horses, haying, irrigating, etc., and their son Michael and his wife, Carolyn, own and operate the upper part of the ranch.